"Visualising Affect Using Virtual Reality"

About the Authors

Polly Card is Senior Video Producer at San Diego State University. She is currently working towards a Ph.D in Education with SDSU/CGU focusing on visual research, race and gender. Pollycard.com

Michelle Ruiz is an instructional designer at the University of California Berkeley. Currently, she is focused on the UC-Mexico Initiative: she designs binational  online courses with faculty from University of California and the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her research interests include issues of equity and binational collaboration in online higher education. Her personal website can be found at mixelle.net.

Contents

Introduction

Context

Positionality & Rationale

Experiencing the World From A New Perspective

The Film

The Film Cont.

Works Cited

Introduction

“Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way.”

--Dead Poets Society, 1989

In this scene from Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams' character invites his students to climb onto his desk to view the classroom from a new perspective.

The text on the following pages (use navigation at bottom or to the left) and the YouTube film included on this page all intent to invoke this "new perspective."  The film, entitled The Ideological Clarity Machine (ICM), is a short 360 film that follows the day in the life of a transborder student attending community college. It was produced to elicit greater empathy and commitment to supporting men of color in community college.

The film dramatises the experience of transborder students. We interviewed a number of transborder students, including Demitri (see Image 1), and synthesize their experiences into a singular cohesive narrative featuring a singular protagonist. The film’s narrative follows a male Latino student from his home in Tijuana, over the border crossing into California, to community college, then to his place of work and back across the border to Tijuana. The film is multimodal: we see the student’s journey, hear his thoughts through narrative voice over, and use graphics to explore the ideology depicted in the scenes.

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